I've been following a couple of recent threads on related topics. I've
also read the documentation on processing flow and looked quite closely
at the code. I suspect this is a relatively common requirement and want
to be sure I am using (or coding) the most appropriate solution.
After exploring ImagePlugin and SlideShowPlugin, I decided neither
suited my problem well enough. I also feel that uploading images to my
wiki is not appropriate, given the way I manage my photo collection as a
file system directory tree on the same machine as my wiki.
I have already written, but not yet completely generalised my own
PhotoCollectionPlugin (yes, it does have its own junit test suite!) It
assumes the jspWiki webapp has direct access (or via a symlink) to a
hierarchical directory structure that holds a photo collection.
My idea is to incorporate my existing digital photograph collection into
my wiki. The directory structure already provides the components of the
wiki page names and titles, thus immediately seeding the search engine
with important keywords, such as the year, month/season or holiday
location. As and when me and my family have the enthusiasm, we can then
add narrative to a wiki page associated with each individual
subdirectory or photo, thus enhancing the richness of our "searchscape".
In other words, one only needs to manually create a page for the "root"
of the photo collection and insert a call to my plugin. From that simple
start, the wiki has the potential to "grow" throughout the photo
collection as users choose to create new wiki pages. At the same time,
new photo directories and images can be added and will immediately
become "potential" new wiki pages.
At this stage of the development, I manually insert plugin statements to
associate a particular wiki page with a particular node or leaf. If the
target is a photo, the plugin can insert a thumbnail as well as the
hyperlink. If the target wiki page already exists, the plugin generates
a standard Wiki.jsp hyperlink to that page. On the other hand, if the
photo (or directory) exists, but the corresponding wiki page does not,
then the hyperlink calls Edit.jsp to create it when/if the link is
eventually followed.
Manual insertion of these plugin statements is tedious and error-prone,
so only suitable for development. My plugin already knows exactly what
should be inserted when it would be (quasi-recursively) called at the
time of creating the new wiki page, so there is no need to involve the
end user in this crucial operation of "wiring" the photo collection
structure into the wiki.
In the ideal world (where is that, by the way...?) I would pass my
generated plugin statement for the target page as a parameter in the
url, something along these lines (line breaks inserted for clarity):
<div><a class="createpage"
href="/wiki/Edit.jsp?
page=FilesPictures2001P2170018.JPG&
insertText=[{INSERT PhotoCollectionPlugin photodir='/2001/P2170019.JPG'}]"
title="Create "Files Pictures 2001 P2170018.JPG"">Files
Pictures 2001 P2170018.JPG</a>.</div>
i.e., following this hyperlink would trigger the creation of the new
wiki page, pre-seeded with the correct plugin invocation to "wire up"
the underlying image file or directory.
My problem is how best to intercept the page creation event and use the
generated jsp parameter value to insert a wiki text string "as if" the
user had decided to type it and save the contents?
I've looked at wiki variables, but don't see how to use them in my
situation.
I've looked at writing my own template, but this doesn't feel like the
best approach - I am not trying to change the look and feel of every
single page in my wiki - only to feed knowledge from an existing wiki
page of "a special kind" into a related-but-yet-to-exist wiki page of
the "same kind".
Janne's recent tip about writing a Filter seems more suitable and I'm
not afraid of writing java code. However, it feels wrong for me to be
writing code specifically for my plugin that ought to be generally
useful... i.e. to watch for the presence of a jsp command parameter and
insert its value into the initial content of a new wiki page.
Have I overlooked something obvious? Suggestions would be very welcome -
especially before I start writing more code!
Regards,
Brian
p.s. thanks for the impressive project! It is hard to take the whole
thing in and make sense of it because I wasn't aware of it earlier in
its development life.
